Town note
Originally known as the West Farms of New London.
about 0:06:35The story
Renee Pellegrino was born in 1956 in Westerly, Rhode Island, one of four children of John and Jean Pellegrino. The family was poor but not destitute. Her father was a Navy veteran of the Second World War who worked as a chef and cook, drank heavily and was, in her sister Diane's phrase, frightfully abusive with his mouth. Her mother stayed at home, kept the household together and believed that education was the way out. Renee was the child everyone expected to escape. She played piano, clarinet and flute, performed a Beethoven piece from memory at four and a Mozart sonata a couple of years later, and her mother saved dollar by dollar to send her to the Prout School, a Catholic school in Wakefield, Rhode Island, instead of the local public school. Renee graduated from Prout with honours in 1973 and went to France for a year, boarding at a Catholic school, but she did not go on to college. Her mother sent her to a psychiatrist in the mid-1970s; lithium was suggested, but Renee hated needles and would not take the blood tests, so she took nothing.
In 1976 she met Paul Vincent, a construction worker with a small contracting business, who would be her on-and-off boyfriend for seventeen years. She enrolled at Rhode Island College in Providence and in the spring of 1977 transferred to Connecticut College, where she flourished and several professors remembered her as one of the brightest students they had taught. Her father was killed by a car while walking along a road in Warwick, Rhode Island, in 1978. Renee graduated from Connecticut College in 1981 in Phi Beta Kappa. Columbia University's graduate business school rejected her, so she went to law school at the University of Connecticut in Hartford in 1984. That same year her youngest sister, Lori, was killed in a car accident in Exeter, Rhode Island, while driving Renee's car, and Renee was consumed with guilt. She had already begun to steal compulsively, and now she began to use cocaine. She graduated from law school in 1986, passed the bar examinations and took a job in Westerly in early 1987.
Her past caught up with her when she applied to the Rhode Island bar. On July 1st, 1988 a character and fitness committee questioned her. She said shoplifting was a way of feeling in control, and asked at the end whether they could see that she was not a bad person. Rhode Island rejected her. Connecticut withdrew its approval, then renewed it on condition that she receive psychiatric counselling. Renee offered to pay a psychiatrist for ten sessions in exchange for the note, and when he refused she criticised his grammar. She never finished the counselling. By the mid-1990s drugs, shoplifting and prostitution were her life. She ended the relationship with Paul Vincent, began injecting rather than smoking, and worked the streets around Green and Tilly Streets in New London. Her daughter Lindsey was born on January 14th, 1995, tested positive for cocaine and was taken into foster care. Renee spent the summer of 1995 with her mother in Westerly trying to get clean, but shortly before the deadline to regain custody she failed a drug test.
By 1996 she was on the streets again. Mark Bronstein, a Connecticut College art librarian who was writing a book about street women, met her in late May 1996 and paid her for interviews over the following year. That morning a patrolman found her naked body on Waterford Parkway South, a rural road in Waterford that runs parallel to Interstate 95 and ends in a cul-de-sac. She had been posed with her arms outstretched and her knees bent. She had been strangled both manually and with a ligature, a combination the deputy chief medical examiner had seen only three times in more than six thousand autopsies. She had a blow to the back of her head, sand and road dirt on her feet, and she was seventeen weeks pregnant. She had cocaine in her blood, and a vaginal swab contained DNA from an unknown man. About forty people attended her funeral, where she was buried in jeans and a sweatshirt under a maple tree within sight of her sister's and father's graves.
The investigation went cold. A reward was posted and later raised to $50,000.
On May 1st, 1998, a man driving his two daughters to the Ramada Inn to swim found the naked body of Michelle Comeau on New Park Avenue in Franklin, near the Norwich line. She was posed in the same way. Michelle was born in 1968, had spent much of her life in hospitals, foster care and group homes, and suffered from bipolar disorder and Tourette's. Investigators compiled twenty-nine similarities between the two murders, but both cases went cold.
Under Connecticut law that felony required him to provide a DNA sample, and it matched the unknown male DNA from Renee Pellegrino's swab. He denied knowing Michelle Comeau until 2009, when he admitted she was a friend he had met at his father's apartment and called himself a trick artist, a man who traded crack for sex.
In December 2012 the state entered a nolle and said it would not retry the Comeau case. At a 2016 hearing over the $50,000 reward, Tony Wilson received part of the money.